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What is the point of a homepage?

Homepages. Every site has one, and everyone has their opinions on what they should contain.

But what exactly is the purpose of the homepage?

It’s pretty simple really. The whole point of a homepage is to get people off the homepage as quickly as possible.

You don’t get conversions by people staying on the homepage. Whatever you’re adding to it you should be thinking “Is this content going to help get people off the homepage and into the useful areas of the site?” If not, then it’s not useful content.

This isn’t just marketing speak here either. We should be giving the user what they’re interested in. They may have come to the site for any number of reasons. And because we can’t guess exactly why each visitor arrives we can’t expect the homepage to fulfill these demands; we’d overwhelm them. No, but we can use the homepage to guide them into the content they’re looking for in an easy, intuitive and efficient manner as possible.

Clearly every site and every business is different, so there is no one correct approach to take to this page, but it’s a page every site has. And every one should have the same purpose; encourage people into the areas of the site where they can find information that they’re looking for, and for the business to convert these site visits against whatever metrics they have.

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One Comment

dave evans 3 years ago

Hi. I guess the only logical answer to your question is, home pages are the top part of a hierarchical navigational structure. This in itself is becoming an outdated mode of navigation, purely because the way we seek information now has changed. To address the problem of having irrelevant content, posted to a page no one cares about, is to change how people navigate by using different structures, especially when you throw in social media, card based design, an ever increasing number of devices/contexts and any other number of patterns which are becoming part of the new landscape norm.